Question

I have a string which is a sequence of html paragraphs, I want to remove (using String’s method replaceAll) paragraphs which contain the word “UPDATE”, usually they are in this form:

<p><a href="blabla">(UPDATE)<a></p>

but there could be other, as for example some strong section.
As it’s almost impossible that a normal paragraph contain the exact word “UPDATE” I’d like just to find a regex which can find a paragraph which contains this word and remove it with

replaceAll("regex","");

can you help me to find “regex” part?I’m not good at all with regex…

Answer 1

I think this is what you’re looking for. You need to use the .*? instead of .* because that forces the search to be lazy instead of greedy.

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String haystack = "<p><a href='bla'>(UPDATE)</a></p><p><a href='bla'><strong>(UPDATE)</strong></a></p><p><a href='bla'><strong>(Non uppercase 'update' to show this match is exact)</strong></a></p><p><a href='bla'><strong>This does not contain the word you're looking for</strong></a></p>";
        String regex = "<p>.*?(UPDATE).*?</p>";

        String result = haystack.replaceAll(regex, "");
        System.out.println("Result: " + result);
    }
}